Empirical Study On Perceived Organizational Identity, Organizational Identification And The Impact

Organizational identification is defined as a process and a state in which themember of certain organization defines himself (or herself) by the same attributes ofthe organization that he (or she) apperceives hence attain the sense of belongingnessto the organization. The concept of organizational identification has been attractingthe increasing wide attention in current era of global competition andknowledge-based economy. In an environment of global competition, in order tomaintain the core competitive edge, enterprises have to adjust their businessstrategies and organizational structures frequently. Such adjustments inevitablygenerate impact on the rewards of employees and lead to a decline in employees'loyalty to the companies. In the mean time, the development of a knowledge-basedeconomy makes the human capital resource and intellectual employees become moreand more important. However, the high mobility of intellectual employee usuallyresults in a growing cost of human resources for a company.Katz (1994) argues that there are three characteristics of an effectiveorganization (1) an effective system to attract and retain employees. (2) a mechanismto ensure a reliable way for the employees to play their required roles in theenterprise. (3)The employees should be creative and motivated. These characteristicsare nevertheless difficult to achieve in current era. The researches on theorganizational identification discover that the more the employees agree to theorganization, the more they incline to think and act according to the overall interestsof the organization. As Organization identification is always identified within a specific enterprise, it can't be imitated and copied; therefore it becomes a majorsource of competitive edge as well as the focus for western corporation theory andbusiness communities.Many researches on organizational identification have been done in past twodecades, and there are substantial interesting findings. However, there are also twomajor gaps needed to be filled. First, there is no systemic and operationalorganizational antecedents' model which can be well applied to the enterprises inpresent researches. Secondly, the current research on organization identification inChina is usually a copy of western research which can't reflect the real situation andbackground of China. Therefore it is urgent to develop local organizationalidentification theory in China.Based on the realities of Chinese enterprises, this dissertation uses the groundedtheory to study the factors that impact the organization identification of Chineseenterprises and thereafter relationships among all the factors and variables, thereforeto reveal the mechanism of organizational identificationDuring the process of reviewing one theoretical basis of current study—thesocial identity theory, the author finds that the organizational identity has itsinfluence in organization identification. Organization identity usually affects theorganization identification through three principles, namely self-continuity,self-distinctiveness, and serf-enhancement. The current organizational identity studyand organizational identification study, however, follow as two separate cules. Andfew combanition researches regard organizational identity as one of an organizationalantecedent, which leads to a limit application in study. What is more important is thatthese researches either come from western or copy form western study clues, there isa lack of Chinese local reaearchs.This dissteration based on Chinese enterprises real situation, uses groundedtheory method to estabilish organizational identity dimensitions, Thereafater tests therelationship among organizational identity dimensions, organizational identification,contextual performance and corporate performance. Accordingly, this dissertation hasa lot of academic values. To achieve the goals, this study was carried out in two stages. First, groundedtheory was applied in the research. The author reviews systematically the westernresearch on organizational identity and discovers that at present, there is still nofeasible and general method to measure the organizational identity which can beuniversally applied. This poses one of the challenges of current study. Second,hypotheises were tested. Thisdissertation hypothesizes that the employees' perceivedorganizational identity could have predicted effect to organizational identification,and organizational identification could have predicted effect to contextualperformance and company performance. Then, organizational identification wouldhave mediator effect between organizational identity and contextual performance.This dissertation conducted several study methods. In organizational identityscale development, grounded theory method, interview and open questionnairesurvey were adopted; coding method was used to analyze qualitative data. Then fourcategories were induced: enterprises advantages, management characteristics, jobcharacteristics, and leadership. Survey and case study were used to test thehypothesis. Then most hypotheses are tested through rigorous analysis of datareported hy 522 employees. In addition, three case studies were carried out with threeenterprises in different industries, which is certainly a complement to the early partof the study.This dissertation has contributed the existing literature in the following aspects:a. grounded theory method was applied to induce organizational antecedents basedon Chinese enterprises, which overcomes the limits in recent research; b.Abstracted the dimensions of the Chinese enterprises which could establish a framefor organiztion identity and organizational identification management; c. Developedthe organizational identity scale of Chinese enterprises, which solved themeasurement problem in organizational research; d. Most of the hypotheses weretested, which means the model of this dissertation is feasible, worthy of further study.Meanwhile, the case study discovered different enterprise' organizational identitiescan be distinguished, which is a further direction to compare enterprisesorganizational identities and organizational identification in different ownership and different industry.This dissertation is sponsored by National Natural Science Foundation of China;several experts in the same research area had agreed that it would be valuable tostudy employees' organization relationship.